Old Virginia Low Lands Low, The

DESCRIPTION: "Ye Tars of Columbia, and listen to my song; It's of a Union battery, I won't detain you long: She was built by Ericcson, a famous man is he"; she fought the Merrimac after the latter beat the Cumberland and Congress "in the old Virginia lowlands, low"
AUTHOR: unknown
EARLIEST DATE: before 1879 (de Marsan broadside)
KEYWORDS: Civilwar battle
HISTORICAL REFERENCES:
March 8, 1862 - Battle of Hampton Roads. U.S. frigates Congress and Cumberland sunk by the CSS Virginia (formerly USS Merrimack). The Minnesota runs aground; had not the Monitor arrived the next day, the Merrimac would have sunk that ship also
May 4-5, 1862 - Battle of Williamsburg
FOUND IN: US
REFERENCES (2 citations):
Wolf-AmericanSongSheets, #1737, p. 117, "Old Virginia Low Land, Low" (3 references)
Greenway-FolkloreOfTheGreatWest, p. 68, "(Then up came Josy Hooker, with all his fighting train)" (1 fragment)
Roud #V6777
BROADSIDES:
Bodleian, Harding B 31(28), "Old Virginia Lowland, Low," H. De Marsan (New York), 1864-1878 (almost illegible)
CROSS-REFERENCES:
cf. "Pompey Snow" (tune, according to Bodleian broadside Harding B 31(28))
NOTES [6730 words]: For background on the Monitor and the Virginia/Merrimac and the Battle of Hampton Roads, see the notes to "The Cumberland Crew" [Laws A18]. The Battle of Hampton Roads is clearly the subject of the usual version of this song, the version included in the de Marsan broadsides.
The Greenway-FolkloreOfTheGreatWest version of this is a conundrum in several ways. First, the lyrics it contains are not in the original broadside; the only thing that links them is the reference to "the old Virginia lowlands low." But it's a Civil War song containing that line; I am assuming identity until and unless another version shows up! The rest of this entry tries to de-mystify this single-verse fragment that may be a second part, or a rewrite, or even an almost-lost original of the song in the broadsides.
The conundrum in the Greenway version is the mention of "Josy Hooker" who "whipped them on the third day and walloped them over again." "Josy Hooker" is certainly Union general Joseph Hooker. The obvious assumption is that the verse refers to the battle at which he commanded the Union army, i.e. the Battle of Chancellorsville. But there are two problems with this. First, although the Chancellorsville campaign lasted a week (May 30-April 6, 1863), the real battle occupied just two days, with some cleaning up on the third day. But second, and more important, Hooker *lost* the Battle of Chancellorsville; he never whipped anyone on any day of the fight (Boatner, pp. 136-140).
The conclusion that I come to is that the reference in the Greenway text is not to Chancellorsville in 1863 but to the Peninsular Campaign of 1862, in which Hooker led a division in the Union III Corps. This makes sense in several other ways: First, the Peninsular Campaign was underway at the time of the Monitor/Merrimac battle, so a reference to the Peninsular campaign would be logical in a song about the Battle of Hampton Roads. Second, the Peninsula was indeed in the Virginia Lowlands (unlike Chancellorsville, which was well inland at a site significantly above sea level).
There were several battles in the Peninsular Campaign (Williamsburg, Fair Oaks/Seven Pines, Seven Days), but only the Seven Days had a third day. That day was the Battle of Gaines's Mill, but Hooker's Division was not in action on that day (Boatner, p. 321). Thus no battle of the campaign really fits the description in the song.
In the absence of clear evidence, logic leads me to conclude that the song refers to the Battle of Williamsburg. The actual fighting spanned just two days (May 4-5, 1862), but the battle was part of the Confederate retreat from Yorktown, which the Confederates had evacuated on May 3, so you could argue that May 5 was the third day of the fight. And Hooker's division was the single most important unit in the fight on the Federal side. I can't prove it, but Williamsburg seems the likeliest context for the song. So we'll take a look at Hooker's history, then at Williamsburg in detail and the other fighting in the Peninsula.
Joseph Hooker (1814-1879) had been educated at West Point (doing very well academically but earning a lot of demerits for bad conduct; SearsChancellorsville, p. 54). He had done good service in the Mexican War (where he in effect ran the commands of generals who were political appointees and didn't know what they were doing) and Indian fighting, but by the time of the Civil War, he had left the army. When the war started, he wanted back in. Making his way to Washington, he managed to talk his way into a brigadier generalship in July 1861 (dated to May 17. 1861; Hebert, p. 50). He received a brigade of New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania troops (Hebert, pp. 51-52). On October 11, he moved up to command a division (Hebert, pp. 53-54). Early in 1862, against the will of army commander George McClellan, the Army of the Potomac was organized into corps, and (after a brief bit of reshuffling), Hooker's Division became the First Division of S. P. Heintzelman's Third Corps (Hebert, p. 72). Hooker would retain this post for the entire Peninsular Campaign, though he burned through several brigade commanders (Hebert, pp. 78-79, tells of Hooker's quarrels with his senior brigadier, Henry M. Naglee, until the latter was replaced by Cuvier Grover).
Although the Battle of Williamsburg took place after the Battle of Hampton Roads, the two are closely related, and Williamsburg was the next big event after Hampton Roads. It is easy to see why someone might add a Williamsburg sequel to a song about Hampton Roads -- or why the second part would be dropped be a publisher who wanted a short piece, because the Monitor/Merrimac battle was much better remembered than Williamsburg.
To understand the connection between the two battles, it's important to know that the Virginia Peninsula was the region between the wide tidal basins of the York River on the north and the James River on the south, with the James flowing into the sea at Hampton Roads. The Peninsula led straight toward Richmond, the destination of every Federal campaign in the east. Union commander George B. McClellan -- who was to reveal a strong disinclination to actually fight -- didn't like the idea of moving south from Washington to Richmond, which would force him to fight his way through a Confederate army that he thought far larger than it actually was. Instead, he would take his army of some 120,000 down the Virginia coast by sea and land in the Confederate rear.
McClellan's original plan had been to land his army to Urbanna on the Rappahannock River, but when Confederate commander Joseph E. Johnston -- who feared the Federal advance that McClellan was afraid to make -- retreated from Manasseh Junction in northern Virginia, that was no longer viable. McClellan needed another idea, and quickly came up with the notion to take his men to the Federal bastion Fort Monroe at the end of the Virginia Peninsula, and move to Richmond from there. Being a fine manager if a poor combat soldier, he did a good job of changing his destination, but it meant that he didn't know much about the roads and fortifications he would encounter (SearsGates, p. 29). The Peninsula was a straight path to Richmond, but the few roads would prove to be terrible. And it was relatively narrow, and one of the narrowest points was near Yorktown (which was, of course, on the York River, on the north side of the Peninsula), which meant that it was generally not possible to maneuver around a position.
This brings us to the distribution of Confederate forces in the area. The main Confederate army was not located in the Peninsula, but the division of John Bankhead Magruder was based at Yorktown to watch the Federals at Fort Monroe. The Virginia/Merrimac was not based in the Peninsula either; it sailed from Norfolk on the south side of Hampton Roads. But it was so unseaworthy that it couldn't proceed far; it was stuck using Norfolk as its base. Had McClellan been able to go to Urbana, this wouldn't have mattered; the Virginia couldn't get at him. Not so in the Peninsula.
This meant that Norfolk and Yorktown were, in an odd way, mutually supporting: If Norfolk fell and the Virginia lost, then McClellan could use Hampton Roads and the south side of the Peninsula to bypass Yorktown, but with the Virginia in place, this was impossible. Similarly, if Yorktown fell, the Confederates would be forced so far up the Peninsula that Norfolk would be untenable and have to be abandoned (at least, that was what the Confederate high command thought; SearsGates, p. 47). And Yorktown was also the lynchpin of the front line in the Peninsula, because if its naval defenses could be cleared, then the Federal navy could sail up the York River past the Confederate line and attack them in the rear (Freeman, p. 148). So Norfolk and Yorktown, even though they had no direct connection, guarded the flanks of the Confederate position, and if either fell, then the Confederates would have to fall back. And so, at the start of the Peninsular Campaign, everyone depended on Yorktown.
McClellan, after landing at Fort Monroe, headed for Yorktown with two corps in front and a lot of additional forces coming up behind. On his left, the James River side, was the fourth corps of Erasmus Keyes (almost certainly the worst of McClellan's corps commanders; McClellan tried to get rid of him -- SearsGates, p. 57 -- and he would be hung our to dry after the Peninsula Campaign; Warner, pp. 264-265). Heintzelman's Third Corps was on the right, toward Yorktown (SearsGates, p. 35). Heintzelman wasn't a particularly dynamic commander either (though probably better than Keyes), but his corps consisted of the divisions of Joseph Hooker and Philip Kearney, probably the two best division commanders in the army at this time, with troops worthy of their commanders.
When Heintzelman and (later) McClellan arrived before Yorktown, Magruder thoroughly deceived them, marching small units up and down the battlefield in such a way as to make it appear he had many more troops than he had (Catton-Lincoln, p. 108; SearsGates, p. 37). McClellan, who was never bold about anything except arguing with his superiors, was sufficiently taken in that he decided to stop his advance and conduct a siege of Yorktown.
When Confederate commander Johnston came to Yorktown, he found major problems with the defenses. One problem was that there weren't enough troops, but worse, the defenses were ill-designed and not complete.
Johnston thought it madness to fight on that spot. He could bring only four divisions to the immediate vicinity (G. W. Smith's, Longstreet's, Magruder's, and D. H. Hill's); all were unusually large, but even so, they mustered only about 56,500 men (Freeman, p. 156). Even those would take time to arrive; McClellan's probes began on April 6, and it was not until April 11 that Johnston and Magruder had even 34,000 men on the spot (SearsGates, p. 45). McClellan had too many troops (about 120,000) and too much siege artillery for Yorktown to be defended with the available Confederates. Johnston wanted to retreat at once to a more defensible position (Freeman, pp. 148-149). Against anyone but McClellan, he was probably right. (Johnston said at the time, "No one but McClellan could have hesitated to attack"; Freeman, p. 154; SearsGates, p. 45.) Against McClellan, if nothing else, Johnston had time; the Federals would not attack until McClellan had brought up every big gun he could emplace. The Confederate War Department didn't know this, but they still ordered Johnston to bring down his entire army and hold the Yorktown line (Freeman, p. 151). Nonetheless, the idea of strategic retreat was obviously on Johnston's mind. He would wait until McClellan was ready to flatten him, then pull out.
Interestingly, even as Johnston was bringing up troops to Yorktown, the Virginia sortied on April 11 (SearsGates, p. 45). The Monitor was still there, and the Federals had other ships with which they hoped to ram and sink the Virginia even if they couldn't damage her armored citadel. The Virginia's new commander was too cautious to accomplish much in the face of so much opposition, so she headed back to port. The game was repeated a few more times in the weeks that followed, with little result (SearsGates, pp. 45-46), but her later voyages might have helped inspire an addition to this song about the place where there was actual fighting going on.
Meanwhile, McClellan's hundreds of heavy guns were slowly but steadily being landed and put into place -- a not-insignificant feat of military engineering, though it would go for naught. Heintzelman's corps was in position to attack Yorktown as soon as McClellan gave the word (SearsGates, p. 61).
Johnston read McClellan very well. Supposedly the last Federal guns were six hours away from being in place when Johnston ordered the retreat on March 3, 1862 (Freeman, p. 155). McClellan, being McClellan, might have waited another day or two to start the big attack, but Johnston couldn't know that. Johnston ordered a lot of artillery fire to deceive the Federals (SearsGates, p. 61; Hebert, p. 80, says this fell primarily on Hooker's men), then pulled out, assigning D. H. Hill's division and the cavalry to cover the retreat (Freeman, p. 174).
When the morning came, there was silence at Yorktown. In an interesting technological twist, General Heintzelman actually went up in a balloon and saw that there was no one there (SearsGates, p. 62). Showing unusual initiative, he shouted out for his pickets to enter the Confederate lines -- where they found nothing except detritus (plus a sign that read "He that fights and runs away Will live to fight another day. May 3" -- SearsGates, p. 62). The siege had lasted exactly a month (SearsGates, p. 66). Joseph Hooker correctly forecast, "The retreat of the rebels I fear will play the devil with McClellan" (SearsGates, pp. 65-66).
In the short term, the Federals were quick to follow, even though it took Hooker until 1:00 p.m. to gather his scattered troops (Hebert, p. 80) and even though McClellan had no plans for an advance beyond Yorktown and had little cavalry organized for the task (SearsGates, p. 67). The Confederates had lots of time to escape -- but they didn't entirely succeed.
Slowing the Confederates was the fact that had only two roads to retreat by, and by May 5, the weather had settled into a steady downpour. The retreating Rebel supply train and artillery simply could not move quickly in the mud (SearsGates, p. 70). The Confederates needed to slow down the advancing Union soldiers. Outside Williamsburg, at a narrow point in the Peninsula, there were a some defensive works centered around a position called Fort Magruder, which Magruder had built months before as a fallback position (SearsGates, p. 70). Johnston ordered a couple of brigades to conduct a rearguard action from there, then decided to assign Longstreet's whole division plus additional troops (Freeman, pp. 175-179).
Meanwhile, the Federals were advancing with two separate divisions (Hooker's of the Third Corps and "Baldy" Smith's of the Fourth Corps) on two different roads (SearsGates, p 70); unfortunately, no one was exercising any real command over the two divisions (Heintzelman apparently tried to get the senior officer in the field, the doddering Edwin V. "Bull" Sumner, to do something, but Sumner couldn't figure out what was going on and did nothing; SearsGates, p. 74). Hooker and Smith were basically on their own, with no coordination between them (SearsGates, pp. 70-71). Hooker went in and found himself in the middle of a big fight, with no support in sight (SearsGates, pp. 73-74).
He was up against Longstreet's division. Longstreet's troops would mostly stay in Fort Magruder and its supporting works, but Hooker's under-supported attack was too tempting to simply await passively. One of Hooker's brigades, the "Excelsior Brigade," lost very heavily, with one of its regiments, the 70th New York, suffering close to 50% casualties (SearsGates, p. 74). Fortunately, Phil Kearny's division came up, and unlike Bull Sumner, he could see and act. Even though he was new to division command, he drove his troops forward and stabilized the situation (SearsGates, pp. 75-77).
The other Confederate troops, from D. H. Hill's division, on May 5 would engage in a counter-attack against Hancock's brigade of Smith's division on the other side of the field of battle. Smith had wanted to send reinforcements; Sumner ordered him not to (SearsGates, p. 78), and indeed ordered Hancock back; only the arrival of the Confederates prevented a useless retreat (SearsGates, pp. 79-80). Hancock's Federals won a tidy little victory. Jubal A. Early's brigade charged them, in the course of which it lost a quarter of its strength and accomplished very little; Early himself was wounded (Freeman, pp. 182-188). The Confederates suffered five times as many casualties as Hancock (SearsGates, p. 81). But one brigade by itself could hardly follow up the win!
After that, the Williamsburg troops, and all of Johnston's army, resumed their retreat (Freeman, p. 193). On the morning of May 6, Union pickets found no Confederates on their front (SearsGates, p. 82).
Overall, the battle was a very bad one for the Federals -- "Baldy" Smith considered the operation "a beastly exhibition of stupidity and ignorance." The Confederates took 1682 casualties, the Federals 2283 (SearsGates, p. 82), and if it hadn't been for Jubal Early's foolish assault, the ratio would have been on the order of 2:1 against the Federals. Two-thirds of the Union casualties were in Hooker's Division, according to BattlesLeaders, p. 200: Cuvier Grover's First Brigade had 33 killed, 186 wounded, 34 missing, for a total of 253; Nelson Taylor's Second Brigade (the Excelsior Brigade) lost 191 killed, 349 wounded, 232 missing (total of 772); Francis E. Patterson's Third Brigade lost 109, 353, 64 (total of 526); and the attached artillery lost 4 killed, 20 wounded (total of 24), making the total divisional loss 1575. Hebert, p. 87, accepts these figures and says they represented 20% of the division's strength for a battle that was "unnecessary" (Hebert, p. 89). McClellan puffed up his triumph to the newspapers (SearsGates, p. 83), but even he was apparently upset with Sumner (SearsGates, p. 84). Hancock got a lot of credit, which he deserved, but Hooker and Kearny justifiably felt slighted (Hebert, p. 89).
It is usually reported that Hooker's nickname "Fighting Joe Hooker" (which he hated) came out of this battle -- a newspaper report described the actions of various units, and included the words "Fighting -- Joe Hooker," and it stuck (Hebert, p. 91, although the same page says that there are some problems with this account). His division certainly fought; Hebert, p. 104, notes that, through the first day of the Seven Days' Battles, Hooker's Division had done more fighting, and taken more casualties, than any other in the Union army.
The next big battle in the Peninsula Campaign was the Battle of Fair Oaks/Seven Pines, a two-day event. Hooker's Division fought, but only on the second day, and its casualties were relatively light (153 killed, wounded, and missing, according to Hebert, pp. 96-97). I don't think this can possibly be the battle referred to in this song.
Then came the Seven Days' Battles. The main battle on Day One (June 25, 1862) was the Battle of Oak Grove (on the south side of the Chickahominy, away from where Robert E. Lee would soon attack the Federal right flank). This was the only time in the entire battle when Federal troops conducted any sort of offensive action, and it quite limited -- but it involved Hooker's division. He was initially told to make an advance, halted, told to pull back, then advanced again. It was not a great success; the Confederates took 441 casualties, the Union 626 -- and half of those were in Hooker's Division, since it had played the leading part (Hebert, p. 103; SearsGates, p. 189, with a map of what was going on on p. 185). But none of it mattered, because Lee's attack on the Federal right would soon render all actions on the Federal left, including Hooker's, irrelevant.
The situation was this: McClellan had brought his army very close to Richmond (about six miles away at some points on the front line). But he had divided the army: Most of it was south of the Chickahominy River, but -- for no good reason -- McClellan had left a reinforced corps, with between a quarter and a third of his total strength, north of the river. The two halves of the army were connected by a few bridges that allowed reinforcements to cross, but not quickly. The forces south of the river, which included Hooker's Division and all of the Third Corps, were the ones in position to attack Richmond. The forces north of the river couldn't do much of anything. And it was those that Robert E. Lee had determined to attack. Day Two of the Seven Days was the first day of Lee's attack, at Mechanicsville.
Lee's attack at Mechanicsville was a flop, and he had taken at least two-thirds of his forces north of the Chickahominy to make it. An aggressive Union general would have taken the chance to smash Lee's small forces south of the Chickahominy and entered Richmond behind him. But McClellan was not an aggressive general. And Lee had put John Magruder's division south of the Chickahominy, and Magruder again showed himself a master stage manager, making his forces seem much stronger than they were. So, on day two, the Federals south of the river sat tight. Hooker's men engaged in some contests of pickets with Magruder, but it was basically an off day for them (Hebert, p. 105).
And even though the attack at Mechanicsville failed to budge the Union lines, it broke George McClellans already-feeble will to fight: "[H]owever grim the failures of the day, General Lee had succeeded in one vitally important respect: he had captured the initiative. Equally important, he had indelibly impressed that fact on the mind of his opponent. Just five hours after the fighting at Mechanicsville ended, General McClellan determined he must retreat from Richmond" (SearsGates, p. 209).
The third day of the Seven Days was the Battle of Gaines's Mill. Once again Lee attacked the smaller part of McClellan's army north of the Chickahominy, and this time he defeated it, reinforcing McClellan's decision to retreat (SearsGates, p. 249, etc.; Boatner, p. 321). Hooker's Division was not involved. Phil Kearny, with some moral support from Hooker and Heintzelman, wanted to go for Richmond. McClellan basically ordered them to shut up and retreat (Hebert, p. 106). McClellan did order some reinforcements north of the Chickahominy (SearsGates, pp. 233-234), but not Hooker (or Kearney); Day Three was once again a quiet day for them.
Day four was a sort of pause; McClellan had pulled his army to a defensible position, and was trying to organize his retreat, while Lee was trying to figure out where McClellan would go next, so there was no major battle on that day although the armies were in contact and there were a few casualties (SearsGates, p. 255). Thus, even if the author of this song considered June 26 rather than June 25 to be the third day of the Seven Days, Hooker did not fight on that day. Day five brought the Battle of Savage's Station, a series of attempts by Lee to attack McClellan's rearguard; the Confederates inflicted substantially more losses than they suffered, but they didn't really change the situation much (Boatner, pp. 721-722), and Hooker was only marginally involved.
The Third Corps finally got into action on day six, the Battle of Glendale, June 30, when five Union divisions, including Hooker and Kearny, fought a rearguard action as the Union army retreated toward the James River and Lee's army tried to stop them (Hebert, pp. 108-109); this time, even McClellan gave Hooker credit (Hebert, p. 110): The Union line had been a jumble of units with no overall commander, but when the Confederates had broken the division of McCall in the Union center, Hooker on the left and Kearny on the right, acting independently, had held their lines and prevented a Confederate breakthrough that would have split the Union army in two (SearsGates, pp. 301-304). This would have been a good candidate for the battle in the song, except that there is no way it can be referred to the "third day."
On the seventh and last day, July 1, the armies fought the Battle of Malvern Hill, in which Lee's troops attempted to storm an impregnable position and were thrown back with immense losses; it was the most lopsided Federal victory on the Virginia front prior to the fall of Richmond. Hooker's troops were in the front line, though their part was relatively minor (Hebert, p. 111). Hooker got some press even so; the editors of the time demanded regular stories from their reporters, and the reporters were developing a tendency to follow Hooker around because he had done more fighting than most and also often provided good quotes; one New York correspondent actually gave Hooker credit for winning the battle -- in the process praising the Excelsior Brigade of New Yorkers, naturally (Hebert, pp. 111-112).
One wonders if Hooker also got credit from the press for fighting on the third day (even though he didn't), and if that contributed to this song.
At the end of July came word of a set of mass promotions to Major General (the highest rank then authorized in the United States Army). Until then, almost everyone in the Army of the Potomac except McClellan had been a Brigadier General. Phisterer, p. 252, lists the officers in this Great Promotion, which included (if I count correctly) 13 generals from the Army of the Potomac. Most of these had their promotions dated from July 4, but Hooker's promotion was dated May 5 (according to Hebert, 115, the date had been moved to that date as the anniversary of the Battle of Williamsburg). That change in date would prove significant for Hooker's career; when the McClellan clique was purged at the end of 1862, it left Hooker senior to almost everyone in the army and in line for higher command. (It will tell you how high the turnover in the Army of the Potomac was that, at Gettysburg less than a year later, only two of those 13 generals were still with the Army of the Potomac.) Hooker would command the Army of the Potomac by early 1863 -- but for the moment he remained a division commander under Heintzelman.
There was one more small skirmish in the Peninsula. McClellan had retreated to a place called Harrison's Landing on the James River. In early August, he ordered a probe toward the Malvern Hill battlefield, and gave the job to Hooker. Nothing much came of it, and McClellan was ordered to leave the Peninsula at about the same time, but Hooker's Division took about fifty more casualties (Hebert, pp. 114-117).
On August 21, Hooker's Division left the Peninsula (Hebert, p. 118). No one knew it, but within a month, Hooker would permanently give up command of the division. For the short run, the division fought near Bristoe Station before the Second Battle of Bull Run and took about 300 casualties (Hebert, p. 121), but it was out of the Virginia Lowlands; it would never return, at least as part of the Third Corps.
Hooker's last battle with his division was Second Bull Run, where John Pope made unsuccessful attacks against Stonewall Jackson's wing of Robert E. Lee's army until Lee arrived with Longstreet's wing and crushed Pope's army between the two halves. Hooker's and Kearny's divisions were both ordered, separately, to attack Jackson, and both managed to get troops into his line -- something no other Union forces managed -- but because of Pope's disastrous battle management, neither attack was reinforced and both were forced back (Hebert, p. 123), with Hooker's Division taking another 1200 casualties in the course of the campaign (Hebert, p. 126; that left the division so weak that even Hooker, who loved fighting, thought it unable to fight). That was basically the end for the old Third Corps command structure; Kearny was killed on September 1 (Warner, p. 259), Hooker promoted to command a corps, and Heintzelman reassigned. The Third Corps was not present at Antietam, and at Fredericksburg, it was commanded by George Stoneman, with Dan Sickles and David B. Birney commanding its divisions. Sickles would take over the corps before Chancellorsville.
Hooker's promotion to corps command took place on September 5, 1862 when he was assigned the command of Fitz-John Porter's Fifth Corps (Porter had been charged by Pope with disobeying orders and removed). The next day, George McClellan brought his friend Porter back and Hooker was moved to the First Corps, which he would command at the Battle of Antietam (Hebert, p. 130). Hooker's forces would open that bloody battle -- and be slaughtered, with Hooker himself taking a bullet through his foot that forced him into the hospital (Hebert, pp. 142-143); his battle career as a corps commander lasted for something like an hour. In any case, Antietam cannot be the battle in the song, since it took place in Maryland, not Virginia, plus it lasted only a day.
Shortly afterward, Hooker, a Major General in the Volunteer Army, was promoted to Brigadier General in the Regular Army (Hebert, p. 146) -- quite a high honor, because ranks in the Volunteer Army would go away once the war was over and the army went back to its regular size. Most of the generals in the war, if they were in the Regular Army at all, were captains or majors -- sometimes not even that! -- so to be a Regular Army brigadier was quite a big deal.
Hooker spent only a couple of months as a corps commander. After Antietam, there was talk of putting him in command of the army, but the Lincoln Administration didn't trust him and gave the job to the disastrous Ambrose Burnside. Burnside then appointed Hooker to lead one of his three "grand divisions" -- units of two corps (Hebert, pp. 151-152); an organization that would last only as long as Burnside (i.e. a few months -- which was a few months too long). After Burnside made a disaster of the Battle of Fredericksburg, then of the so-called Mud March, and managed his logistics so badly that his troops were starving, the Administration was forced to do something. They dithered for a time, not wanting to appoint Hooker to command the army but having no other good option, but he finally got the job (Hebert, pp. 166-167; the other two Grand Division commanders quit as a result -- but that hardly mattered, since Hooker had no use for the Grand Divisions anyway).
Hooker wasn't expected to be a good administrator, but in fact he proved excellent at it, improving the food and sanitation, improving the men's quarters, raising the standard of training, tightening up discipline but also instituting furloughs, and working to improve the quality of officers in the Army of the Potomac (Hebert, pp. 179-181; SearsChancellorsville, pp. 70-74). Because of his failure in battle, this work tends to be forgotten in shorter histories, but without Hooker, the army might have been too demoralized to have won at Gettysburg. As SearsChancellorsville comments on p. 54, "General Hooker understood a good deal more about commanding the Army of the Potomac than any general ho had held that post before him."
Eventually Hooker ordered his troops out on what became the Chancellorsville campaign -- and became the only Federal general ever to outsmart Lee: "Hooker's campaign plan was inspired -- ' decidedly the best strategy conceived in any of the campaigns ever set on foot against us,' said Confederate soldier and historian Porter Alexander -- and his opening maneuvers were brilliantly successful. After the war... 'I won greater success on many fields in the war,' [Hooker] wrote, 'but nowhere did I deserve it half so much..." (SearsChancellorsville, p. ix) -- SearsChancellorsville goes on to conclude that Hooker was "more sinned against [than sinning], by inept lieutenants and simple happenstance."
Hooker came up with a plan to force the Army of Northern Virginia out of its defensive lines at Fredericksburg and fight on ground of Hooker's choosing. The plan worked; Hooker had Lee trapped between the two wings of his army, and had only to complete his maneuver to destroy the Confederate army. Instead, he seemed to lose his nerve and stopped all his forces in place (Hebert, p. 200). It gave Lee the chance to turn on the wings of Hooker's army separately.
The Battle of Chancellorsville is considered the greatest of all Lee's victories -- outnumbered two to one, and surprised, he still inflicted a defeat upon Hooker. In fact the victory hurt Lee's army far more than Hooker's -- Lee's 13,000 odd casualties were more than 20% of his army, Hooker's 17,000 odd were only about 15% -- and Lee lost Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson to the bullets of his own men. Chancellorsville was a big step toward the end of the war -- in some ways, it improved the Union position more than Gettysburg did. It didn't matter. On the map, it looked like a loss. Pluss most of Hooker's corps commanders no longer trusted him, and the same was true of most of the government (Hebert, pp. 228-229). And certainly it is true that Hooker's nerves had let him down once, and might let him down again. The administration wasn't united enough to fire him -- but they kept interfering with his plans and giving him orders he didn't want to follow. As Lee's army headed north toward Pennsylvania -- the campaign that would culminate in the Battle of Gettysburg -- Hooker eventually got fed up. In a grandstanding move, he sent off his resignation -- and was shocked to find it accepted (Hebert, pp. 242-245). Hooker's connection with the Army of the Potomac was done; George Gordon Meade would lead it at Gettysburg.
Which didn't quite mean that Hooker's career was over, though he would never serve again in Virginia (meaning that this song has to be about something before this time). There was talk for a time of him being given a corps in the Army of the Potomac, but Meade was understandably opposed (Hebert, p. 248).
Then the Union Army of the Cumberland was defeated at the Battle of Chickamauga, retreated to Chattanooga, and was besieged. The Union high command had to scramble to rescue the army before it was starved into surrender. Troops were sent from various Union armies to help out. General Meade was told to send two corps from the Army of the Potomac to provide part of the relieving army.
What followed was pretty predictable. Meade chose his two worst and weakest corps (Catton-Never, pp. 243-245). One was the Eleventh Corps, which, after Meade thoughtfully took away one of its three divisions, was much the weakest in the army, and which was blamed (slightly but not entirely unjustly) for disasters at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg; the other was the Twelfth Corps, which was a little stronger, and certainly had better troops, but still weak -- plus it was commanded by Henry Slocum, who just happened to be the senior officer of the Army of the Potomac, senior to Meade, so he was embarrassing to have around (before Meade was appointed, Slocum had said that he was willing to serve under Meade -- SearsChancellorsville, p. 435 -- but people could change their minds!).
These two corps were so small -- just nine brigades -- that the logical thing to do would have been to organize them as one corps, but instead the high command kept them separate and put them under Hooker -- over the vociferous objections of both Slocum and Oliver Howard, the two corps commanders, who didn't want to serve under him after Chancellorsville (Hebert, pp. 250-251). The troops went west anyway, with Slocum and Howard attached although they didn't really have much to do because of the small size of the force. Hooker's troops helped to establish the "cracker line" that let Chattanooga be supplied, although his quarrels with his officers continued, and Grant (no judge of character or of soldierly quality, as his treatment of George H. Thomas showed) wanted to reorganize his troops and get rid of both Hooker and Slocum (Hebert, pp. 255-260).
Hooker wasn't quite done yet, though. It was his troops that took Lookout Mountains in the "Battle Above the Clouds" that opened the Battle of Chattanooga (Hebert, pp. 263-264). He also played a part in the pursuit of the defeated Confederate army, though this still didn't endear him to Grant (Hebert, pp. 266-267). At the end of 1863, after Meade had spent the whole fall season (for practical purposes) avoiding fights with Lee, there was actually talk of bringing Hooker back to head the Army of the Potomac. When Grant became General in Chief in 1864, he firmly squelched that! (Hebert, p. 170). Hooker was stuck with his equivalent of a corps. At about that time, it was reorganized as an actual corps, the Twentieth, which meant that Howard and Slocum were out from under Hooker (Hebert, pp. 272-273); Hooker himself served as corps commander under George H. Thomas in the Army of the Cumberland. But Grant's friend Sherman was placed in charge of all the Western armies, so Hooker was still distrusted by the army's high command.
Sherman's army had a strange organization. It wasn't actually termed an army; rather, it was three armies -- Thomas's Army of the Cumberland, by far the largest of the three, in which Hooker served; the Army of Mississippi; and the Army of the Ohio, which was just a glorified corps. The problem was not that that three parts were designated "armies"; it was that they were very unequal in size, which made operations complicated -- it was not possible to divide the army into equal thirds, or even equal halves. But these were the forces Sherman commanded as he tried to take the city of Atlanta. McMurry, p. 33, considers Hooker "by far the most capable of Thomas's corps commanders," and I think the evidence supports this. But, as the army was approaching Atlanta, James B. McPherson, Sherman's favorite and the commander of the Army of Mississippi, was killed. Hooker thought he deserved to replace him. He was right, really, but Sherman didn't want him (McMurray, p. 107 and elsewhere, refers to Sherman's "unfair and unbecoming" behavior toward Hooker) and appointed Oliver Howard instead, despite Howard's many military failings and religious hysteria -- and Hooker, for the last time, let his ambition overcome his common sense. As a grandstand play, he resigned his corps command (Hebert, pp. 284-285; Warner, pp. 234-235; Cox, p. 179), and Sherman of course did not argue. And that was that; Hooker's career as a field commander was over (Hebert. pp. 286-287). In a further irony, Hooker's replacement was Slocum, the other officer who had been moved to let Hooker command the combined Twentieth Corps.
I have no doubt, personally, that Hooker would have been a better commander than Howard, but there were two problems with him. First, he was senior to Thomas, and if there was one thing that everyone agreed on, it was that Thomas had to be Sherman's successor if something happened to Sherman. (Frankly, Thomas should have been in charge of the whole thing; he was the best general the Union developed in the war -- and he wasn't even as wildly ambitious as most Federal officers were.) And, second, Hooker and Sherman just didn't get along, and Sherman didn't need Hooker causing friction (cf. Cox, p. 179). Thus Hooker's relentless ambition cost both Hooker and the army.
He was eventually given charge of a behind-the-lines district, but he had nothing to do there except hunt for Confederate sympathizers and write aggrieved letters to politician friends (Hebert, pp. 288-289). He did get to play a role in the transportation of Abraham Lincoln's corpse back to Illinois (Hebert, p. 292). He also had time to court Olivia Groesbeck; the 50-year-old lifelong bachelor married her in September 1865 (Hebert, p. 293). It was not to bring either one much happiness. The ruddy complexion that had made Hooker look so alluring may have been a sign of a heart condition; in November 1865 he suffered a stroke (interestingly, it was at a reception for General Grant -- Hebert, p. 293 -- so perhaps he was feeling more irritated than usual). He would suffer another stroke in 1867, and his wife died in 1868 -- though she at least left him enough money to be relatively comfortable in retirement (Hebert, p. 294).
Not even a stroke could keep him from continuing to complain about superiors and colleagues like Grant, Sherman, and Howard, which engaged in for what was left of his life; he died unexpectedly on October 31, 1879 (Hebert, p. 295; Warner, p. 235), a general who had been very good for every day of his career except two, but who had blighted his career with his quarreling and inability to keep his mouth shut.
Unlike most major Civil War figures, there is apparently only one full-length biography of Joseph Hooker: Hebert's, the one cited here. Its maps are hand-drawn, and it is obviously very dated (e.g. its attitude toward Indians and Mexicans is dreadful). There aren't many books about the Battle of Williamsburg, either; perhaps it's no surprise that the Joe Hooker version of this song is almost forgotten. - RBW
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